Book I: Chapter viii -- "The Scourge of God"

Why does God let bad things happen to good people?  That's a common question nowadays, often called by the theological shorthand word "theodicy."  St Augustine is interested in the matter -- but, true to the pessimism about human nature for which he is famous, he asks it a little differently than we happy modern Americans do.  He wants to know why God lets good things happen to bad people.

When Rome fell to Alaric and his warriors, some people -- both Christian and otherwise -- were spared when they took refuge in Christian churches.  Augustine has already pointed to this as an example of the true strength of the Christian God, as opposed to the weakness of the pagan gods who, in the sacking both of Troy and its daughter Rome, could not even protect their own statues.  Now he asks why God cared to protect the "wicked and ungrateful" pagans who fled to him for refuge.

His first answer is:

[P]atientia Dei ad paenitentiam invitat malos, sicut flagellum Dei ad patientiam erudit bonos [...]

Patientia is not precisely the same as the English "patience."   It is probably related to passio, "I suffer,"  which has a somewhat obsolete sense of "to put up with," the way Jesus does with little children.  Dyson translates it as "forbearance," which is not a common word these days.  A dictionary definition is "endurance," which may be better.  It can mean either physical or mental endurance, in the latter case either an admirable resignation to one's fate or a contemptible lack of spirit.  A flagellum is a whip or scourge, or figuratively the sting of conscience.

So the key phrase can be rendered:

God's willingness to put up with them welcomes the wicked, just as God's whip teaches the good to put up with [suffering]

This is an interesting idea, and one worth playing with.

It is common for Christians to think, simplistically, that God rewards the good and punishes the guilty.  This is clearly wrong.  In the present life, as a matter of observable fact, the wicked often prosper, and those who seem to be good (or more often who feel themselves to be good) are required to put up with great suffering.  Moreover, from a the radically Augustinian perspective that shapes the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions, nobody is really "good."  We are all sinners of one sort or another, our only hope in the goodness of Christ.

That may not be quite how Augustine himself sees things.  His famous interpretation of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes is that the Church is a mixed body, in which both good and evil people are gathered until the final judgment.  He can be read hyper-Calvinistically, then, as calling some people ultimately, intrinsically good and others as evil, rather than addressing the mixture of good and evil in each of us.  But he can also be read, I think, in the more moderate fashion -- and let's stick with that for a moment.  Let's say that "good" and "evil" are conditions which exist in every person, to varying degrees.

If that's a fair reading, then to Augustine God's anger is a whip [flagellum] which drives the good -- meaning that part of us which is good -- to be better, by acquiring a new if undesired virtue, while God's mercy is an invitation of some sort to that part of us which is bad.  Presumably, it is either an invitation to abandon our wickedness or an invitation to trust that God's mercy is greater than our capacity for evil.

Neither of these is punishment.  Although Augustine does seem to believe that God offers this-worldly punishments, he also knows that -- since the rain falleth alike on the just and the unjust -- it is an error to treat each of life's vicissitudes as either a reward or a punishment.  Life is, in a sense, a school of morals, or better yet a mystagogy, in which God tries to draw us closer by different means.